Below is the speech by TUV leader Jim Allister during yesterday’s debate on Transforming Your Care:
“The shine has certainly come off the glossy rhetoric of Transforming Your Care. The public disillusionment and disappointment are accentuated by the fact that those now in charge were those who, when not in charge, made it sound so easy. In the years that were spent vilifying Michael McGimpsey as Health Minister, the constant refrain was that there was not a money problem in the health service, just a management problem, and that, if he had been a better Minister and had had the skills that they thought they had, there would have been no problem whatsoever in the health service. Of course, how different it has turned out to be. There has not been even a by-the-way apology to Mr McGimpsey for their vilification of him over the years; rather, there has been an arrogant pretence: “Well, everything has changed. It was totally unforeseeable”. They have, of course, just discovered that running the health service is not as easy a project as they seemed to think it was for so long.
“Transforming Your Care has been a great disappointment to many. I am not totally surprised, because it seemed to me from the outset that it was over-optimistic in its view that you could simply devolve to the community so much that was being done in the health service and that you could have care packages that would remove the need for doctors, hospitals, emergency units, visits and everything else.
“At the same time, we know that the care packages in the community are essentially meagre. We all hear stories of the carers who have seven minutes in which to do an hour’s work. No wonder, then, that, when you build Transforming Your Care on such sand, it begins to sink in the manner in which it has.
“Another issue in Transforming Your Care is that we were going to solve the problems in A&E departments without having any regard to the fact that we had guaranteed logjams in those departments by, over the past five years, reducing the number of beds in our hospitals by 16% — in some boards by 20%. It does not take a lot of brain to work out that, if you reduce the number of beds in hospitals on that scale, you will inevitably produce a logjam at the access point of A&Es, and so it has turned out.
“It is supposed to be some sort of creditable, laudable thing that fewer people now have to wait 12 hours: it is scandalous that anyone has to wait 12 hours in an A&E department. Yet, that is turned into some sort of virtue. There is nothing virtuous about the fact that our A&E departments regularly see waits of that length, with the serious adverse incidents that have been connected to it.
“Then we take the situation relating to statutory residential homes. The Minister has ducked and dived on this issue so many times, but the fundamental remains that it is his policy to destroy statutory residential homes. He goes through the motions of consultation but refuses to take the elementary step of making the homes have a viable future by removing the moratorium on new admissions. You cannot viably test the future of a home while denying access. It is a means of bleeding the homes to death, and that is the Minister’s policy.
“The Minister was content to see 100% closure in the Northern Health and Social Care Trust until there was a public outcry. He had advance knowledge that that was the plan. I have it in Assembly answers: he had advance knowledge of the plan of the Northern Trust to shut 100% of its homes, and he had nothing to say until a 90-year-old lady, Mrs Faulkner, blew the whistle and set off a public outcry. Then, he sought to pretend that that was not his policy and it was those unmanageable mandarins doing things that really were against his will. Where does the buck stop in the health service? It never seems to stop with the Minister. Has there been a single issue in his tenure of office for which the Minister has taken responsibility?
“It seems not once. It is always someone else’s fault. It was the Minister’s fault when it was Michael McGimpsey, but it is never the Minister’s fault now. Strange that, isn’t it?”